Obama’s stimulus bill is finally law, all 787 billion dollars of it. On Friday, the final version of the bill passed the House 246- 183 and the Senate 60-38. Once again, not a single house Republican voted for it. In the Senate, it only got three GOP votes. It’s been a long, arduous process as Republicans did their best to try and sabotage America’s best hope of getting its economy back on track. But now the stimulus package is law and, though its not quite as big as it should have been, it’s still a great piece of legislation.
However, now the dust has settled on a bruising legislative battle it looks like there has been a casualty. Bipartisanship is dead, long live bipartisanship:
White House aides say they have concluded that Obama too frequently lost control of the debate and his own image during the stimulus battle. By this reckoning, the story became too much about failed efforts at bipartisanship and Washington deal-making, and not enough about the president’s public salesmanship.
For Obama’s next act, the program is the same as he has been planning for months: New Deal-style plans to rescue struggling homeowners and rewrite regulations on the financial markets, plus a budget proposal that lays the groundwork for sweeping health care reform.
But the strategy to promote these items is getting an emergency overhaul. Obama plans to travel more and campaign more in an effort to pressure lawmakers with public support, rather than worrying about whether he can win over Republican votes in Congress.
Obama has obviously finally noticed what the rest of us have been screaming at him : bipartisanship isn’t working. To celebrate the President’s epiphany I present to you five truisms that might have persuaded the president that bipartisanship is, well, pretty rubbish really:
1) There’s no point in being bipartisan if the other side won’t play ball. Obama made sure Republicans were part of stimulus discussions. He made sure controversial family planning provisions were axed from the first draft. Hell, right from the start the stimulus already had over $200 billion of the two words Republicans love most: tax cuts. How did that work for him? House: zero Republican votes. Twice! Senate: Three Republican votes. Fact is, the party of Reagan and Bush don’t do bipartisanship. They’d rather become the party of Taliban-esque insurrectionists. You have to read it to believe it…
2) You can’t have bipartisanship if the other party’s stupid. The lesson here is that unless you want your bipartisanship to be merely of the symbolic variety, then only offer to take on board your opponent’s ideas if your opponents actually have an ideas worth using. However, the only idea Republicans had, apart from doing nothing, was the laughably destructive proposal by Senator Jim DeMint, which received near universal support from the GOP. Essentially, his plan was to just pass two trillion dollars of tax cuts. Incredible as it may sound, that was the best they could come up with.
3) Trying to be bipartisan ruins your strategy. If Obama had brought to the table a trillion dollar first draft of the bill, then when the inevitable compromises came it probably would still have ended up around $900 billion. Instead, so as to not to compromise the dialogue with Republicans, he kept it in the $800 billion region. Therefore the final stimulus bill, though still a great piece of legislation, is arguably nowhere near big enough to turn the economy round for definite.
4) No-one thanks you for being bipartisan. Republican response to Obama’s bipartisan offerings was to… accuse Democrats of not being bipartisan. The media’s reaction to Republican refusal to play ball was to… blame Obama for the failure of Bipartisanship. Frankly, it just ain’t worth the effort.
5) Bipartisanship hurts the country. With the U.S. in dire need of a good economic recovery package, the Senate negotiations over the stimulus bill were essentially put into the hands of a few moderate Republican senators who, in a bizarre ode to meaningless symbolism , went through it randomly cutting the funding of socially just provisions that also created jobs (their targets included such evil ideas as money for building schools). Some of the damage was repaired by Democrats before the final bill was passed, but the lesson here is clear: give Republicans any power, and they will try and find a way to harm America.
Bipartisanship won’t be dead for ever. At some point it will return, zombie-like, to munch on the brains of otherwise sane politicians. But, for now, let’s celebrate not just the passing into law of a great, socially just and economically sensible stimulus package, but also the President’s determination to no longer waste his time with bad-faith Republicans. Now, Barack, you can really make a difference…
